Mods: I wasn’t sure if this question should be here, or in another forum. It doesn’t deal with a specific column by the master, or this message board, so I hope this is right.
Anyways, I searched the archive, but didn’t come up with anything. I would imagine that with the explosion of the net, the amount of questions coming in is nowaday enormous. If I read older stuff by Cecil, things in his first book, there are questions answered that are quite lame, by our standards today. My guess is that had one of those question showed up today, it would - at best - be handled as a staff report.
So anyway - how many questions come in during a normal week? E-mail / ordinary mail? Is it still possible to bribe Cecil?
And does his (official) e-mail account receive as much spam/virus as I think it does?
Could I hope for an answer by Little Ed?
I have it on good authority that Cecil gets about 300-400 e-mails a week, more than half of them spam. Many of the non-spam messages are questions that have already been answered, comments on previously published columns or Staff Reports, or just lame questions. There are about 20-30 real questions every week deserving of an answer, of which only about 3 get answered. Cecil writes one column every week, but sometimes he covers more than one question. There are two Staff Reports most weeks.
About the volume of snail mail, I don’t know. I get the impression that at least half the questions Cecil answers still come in that way, but I’m not sure. Cecil does take the occasional question off the SDMB to answer in his column. Virtually all the questions answered in Staff Reports come in by e-mail.
I’m not sure what fourm would be best for this either, so I’ll leave it here for now.
But Bibliophage, you still haven’t answered the most pressing question … to wit …
Julie
If you had read any of the SD books of Cecil’s columns, you would have recalled that Cecil mentions such things as
“Thanks for the double sawbuck” and “thanks for the sawbuck” in some of his columns from the 1980’s. I’m merely paraphrasing what the Great One said, but he never mentioned sending the money back…
There was also that thing about the toy dinosaur…
Yes, Cecil is certainly open to brib-- ah, to emoluments. So far, to my knowledge, none have come via email although there have been promises. Lots of promises.