I believe, based on the “Modest Proposal” thread and “Cecil’s” remark upon closing it, something like “you might be right” to DSeid’s prediction that doom is in the offing, maybe, for real this time, and that Ed has rethought this and probably has given up the idea of writing columns again, or at least doing so with sponsorship from the Board. I could be wrong but I bet he never announces this here formally, but we’ll figure it out eventually. If I were him, and had made this proposition and watched the posts go from overwhelmingly supportive to wait a minute, Ed’s not giving details and why should we care about him anyway, I’d feel like I had badly misjudged my influence in this arena and never should have tried this.
Once upon a time In the 70s, the weekly paper Boston After Dark started running a thing called “Owen Slade’s Need-To-Know”, where you could send in a question on any topic, anything at all, and Owen would do his best to answer it in plain language, no jargon, just the facts as best he could determine them without getting too much into the weeds. In Chicago, they copied this idea with The Straight Dope, and improved it by being entertaining and making it clear they weren’t interested in pat answers, the sort of Received Wisdom that gets passed around even if it smells fishy - they would make an effort to dig deeper, and weren’t shy about admitting that there are things we just don’t know.
We were hippies and didn’t trust the Man. It was the difference between Merv Griffin having Mickey Rooney on his show and letting him do his “these are the Greats of Show-Biz” routine, and David Letterman having Mickey on and poking fun at that stuff.
The Straight Dope filled a niche, and Ed Zotti, after taking on the Cecil role, was exceptionally good at choosing which questions might be fun to look into and covering all bases when writing about a topic, within the limits of a short weekly column. People might respond but it was usually to bring up an angle he should have considered. Seldom was he caught with his pants completely down. As has been noted, times have changed and it’s much easier for anyone to do research on their own, but I promise you the same boilerplate half-truths are out there, getting passed on because it’s easier to do that than drill into a subject, but I think these days it’s more confined to specialist corners which a general interest column would want to stay away from. (Go to an audio forum and watch the sparks fly over “brickwalling”. Don’t care? Me neither.) But I still insist there are General Interest topics that cry out for the SD treatment if you look for them.
I wanted to do this little history lesson, in case the Straight Dope Message Board goes away tomorrow and there’s no warning siren. I would miss it, not that I’m a huge presence here, and I’m not even sure what people mean when they talk about the SDMB “community”, it’s just a lot of users with mostly made-up names who come and go but I guess some are more invested in this than me, and I’ll feel bad for them, especially since I have no realistic expectation that Ed or anyone else will make an announcement when the auld-lang-syne moment is upon us, but that’s how things function on the commercial internet. It would be nice to know ahead of time, so we could make our confessions, but maybe someone will do a podcast or HBO documentary called The Life and Death of Cecil Adams and the Straight Dope, which I’d be sure to look into; it would be a very interesting slice of media history.
