Cecil is really Ed???:eek:
Is that why y’all are slashin’ em together like that???
I always thought Cecil was the “guy on top of the mountain in Peru” and Ed was like, his “conduit” and the overall manager of the SDMB!
If they’re one and the same, then I’m even more naive than I thought!:eek:
So which is it?
Quasi
Don’t feel bad, it’s confusing - deliberately so. The short answer is that they’re the same. The long answer is a little more complicated (the Straight Dope column existed before Ed took charge, there may be several contributors to the column, etc. It used to be fun to pretend they were different people, much as some families maintain the Santa Claus fiction long after the kids have figured it out.
These links are unofficial and may be tongue-in-cheek, but taken together with a grain of salt they will shed some light on the subject:
http://www.ipass.net/whitetho/edcecil.htm
http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question106975.html
Quasi, if I can employ a Princess Bride Metaphor here, then the entity writing this column is really a Dread Pirate Cecil, if that makes sense.
In other words, Cecil is a “brand”, and there have been many people writing under the guise of “Cecil”. Someone was doing it before Ed came along, and assuming the “Straight Dope” concept doesn’t fall (further?) into obsolescence, someone else will no doubt take it over when Ed finally tires of the role.
From your mouth to God’s ears. 
Ed Zotti is, was, and always will be Ed Zotti. Somebody has always been the Dread Pirate Cecil. It’s a pseudonym used by the author of the weekly column (hence the ill-fated effort to trademark it).
As for the board, consider the newspaper business. The profit centers are circulation, display advertising, and classified advertising – subscriptions and two kinds of paid ads. But newspapers are content providers. People do not pay, in general, for a collection of ads. News – national and local – and features are net liabilities from a strictly profit-and-loss standpoint – but they provide the content that sells the paper, driving circulation and hence ad rates.
The board is an online community, one of the earliest ones to still survive, self-selected as a group of people who include experts on a wide range of subjects, from across more than half the globe. Want to know the highway conditions of the road to Alaska’s North Slope, the future of the forest ecosystem in Costa Rica, surviving influences of the Khivan khanate in Uzbek culture, relativistic physics of cosmic rays, the valuation of a Christian Gobrecht gold coin, or the prospects of clean coal-fired electricity generation? We’ve got people who can answer each authoritatively – and they count each other as friends,
If someone cannot figure out how to make money from maintaining and marketing that community, well… their name is Ben Eason. (Not Ed – he was handed the task, “Make money off the SDMB” with no resources to turn it around – an unfunded mandate if there ever was one – and put his efforts into it. He’s not the world’s best manager or communicator, but he IS a decent man, at least most of the time. And he seems sincere about keeping this place going if at all possible. Give him that.) Hopefully Afalaya will see the value of this, and give Ed or a team working with him what it needs to make this a profit center for the newspaper group.
I feel like a kid who’s just been told there ain’t no Santa.
Okay, then.
But then that’s all the more reason why SDMB should continue, because if no one person is Cecil, that must mean that all of us, collectively, are, because we’re all here helping each other not be ignorant.
And we’re all here helping each other through all the adversity in our lives.
Some of us needing more help than others.
Thanks
Quasi
I still come here as much for Cecil’s weekly column as I do for the Board itself. Sadly, of course, the column has long since lost some of the panache it had in the 90s when I first ran across it on AOL. This means that Friday isn’t quite as awesome a day as it once was. Still, I do chuckle quite a bit reading it. And reading the old columns is fun. 
But I’m not shocked that some are here just for the Board. The fact that it was allowed to expand to so many non-Cecil aspects made that inevitable. Not that it is a good or bad thing, just inevitable.
Unfortunately, the problem is that whilst a smartarse Q&A column with a serious bent to it might have been novel and useful back in 1973, when research was time-consuming and involved going to these mystical places called “Libraries” and reading through piles of things strange things called “Books” for information, nowadays you can type any question you have (or subject you want information on) into Google or Wikipedia and have the answer nearly instantly.
Now, the ironic thing is that the Message Boards are actually more useful (IMHO) than the column itself, because there’s such a wide range of experience and knowledge here on all sorts of obscure subjects and it’s interactive.
The thing is, Cecil doesn’t really participate in the boards, and it’s not unusual to see newbies coming in to ask questions directed to Cecil “Dear Cecil: Why do we speak English in America and not American?”) and yet I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen Cecil respond to, or acknowledge, any of these posts (although the members here handle them pretty deftly, for the most part).
Yes, I’m told he’s posted here occasionally, but he’s not a Regular Presence, if that makes sense. For what it’s worth, I’ve never actually seen a “Straight Dope” column in print, nor have I seen any of the books. Also, the lack of updates to “Classic Cecil” columns does rather undermine the whole “World’s Smartest Person” thing when there’s patently outdated information being displayed- even with a “March 6th, 1997” dated on it, for example.
It’s hard to explain, but it’s like the corporate culture at Creative Loafing was still suck in the '90s with regard to “This Internet Thing All The Kids Are Doing These Days”.
Does “Cecil Adams” have a Twitter feed, for example? As far as I know, the answer is “No”. But it’d be a marvellous way to attract new readers to the column and to CL’s online-based papers.
Let’s put it this way: This an Internet message board with members that can do whatever the hell they want, as long as they don’t break the rules. Telling someone to go away, on the other hand, is a bit tricky, since it gets close Junior Moderating. Addressing it to a particular person makes it close to a personal insult. And telling people to shut up is quite close to falling afoul of the “Don’t be a jerk” policy.
And all for what? No matter how true the statement is, what good does it do informing people that can do nothing about it? The people that are in a position to say something have either been cryptic or admit they don’t know what will happen.
If we are truly worried about the board going down, let’s do something about it. Start copying stuff off and backing it all up. Each of the posters still own the content of their posts (and I freely give my permission for my posts to be copied with the sole intent of reposting them on a replacement board.)
If that advice seems too radical, then the fear of this place being closed down must not be that great.
This, frankly, sounds a lot like junior modding to me.
To be clear I certainly did not tell him to “shut up”. I was clearly addressing his post in the first sentence; in the second I was suggesting (perhaps too abruptly) that he either join the discussion (which I have been following and participating in for some time) or go elsewhere. That’s nothing like junior modding.
And you thought Machu Picchu was the only wonderful thing we had on a mountain here?
…and don’t even get me started on Kuelap
FWIW, I first came here because of an admiration for the column, but I now come directly for the boards and learn much more from them directly, especially because of the efforts of those like Una, and many others, and from the challenges to my cherished beliefs - that results in either me coming to new conclusions or at least having a greater understanding of the issues that support my position.
Not much to build a business model off of though is it?
Ed’s real time interpersonal skills have been either absent or harmful when present.
I doubt too many of us click through many ads and the system made it hard to keep up membership even for those who had intended to do so.
A new owner should be focused on building local papers into things that people can only get locally, supported by centralized humor and other broader features such as editorial voices on national issues and maybe even some very focused investigative journalism - taking advantage of the cloud of contributers willing to be “eyzeneers”*. I do not know where hosting small communities like ours fits in a business plan.
*Yeah, a neoligism for individuals willing to be part of that massive cloud computing performed by people all of whom act as eyes and ears distributed on the ground all over the world.
It’s important to remember that, on a balance sheet, every asset is a liability and and every liability is an asset. (That’s why they call it a “balance sheet”.) In other words, something like shareholders’ investment, for instance, is a liability on one side of the sheet (it is money owed to them), but it is an asset on the other side of the sheet (it is money in the bank). Well, actually, that’s equity, but still. Just for simple illustration. Same for property like copiers, computers, and stuff like that. On the one hand, they cost money; but on the other hand, they have value (which depreciates over time, the details of which are sometimes covered by state law and such.) Labor costs are a big (often the biggest) liability, and is more complicated (owing to onerous regulation and of course taxation), but even they are offset by cash (which is used to pay the government and the salaries.)
In any case, assets are generally what you own, while liabilities are what you owe out. Equity is the difference in the other two. If your assets exceed your liabilities, then you have positive equity; otherwise, you have negative equity. Assets are always equal to your liabilities plus your equity. (There are also “current assets” and “current liabilities” as well as non-current for each, and so on, but the gist of it is as I said.)
So, while the SDMB might be a liability in one sense, there will be either offsetting assets or offsetting equity. The idea is to make it more of the former, and less of the latter.
Maybe we the readership should incorporate and make a bid to take the SDMB off their hands.
Sure thing. All we’d have to do is lose our anonymity, raise the funds, and decide on a Chairman and board of directors that the Teeming Minions could all agree on.
I just hope, that if the SDMB cannot continue as it is, that it doesn’t suddenly just “shut down” and I/we get the “This Page Cannot Be Displayed” message.
I know the admins are “ham-strung” regarding what they can and can’t say at this point, and I sure understand this, but at the same time I hope *someone * is looking at the “big picture”, and not just the profit margin.
The “Teemsters” are probably the largest dysfunctional family on the net, but dammit, we are family.
At least that’s what some of y’all have told me I am!
Thanks
Quasi
I think the board should stay, because so many of us follow Princess Bride, and get the reference. [Oh, and our MST3K following is good too, et al.]
But, Wm. Poundstone has set me of on the Cecil as Ed path many years back. [Then again, I have a few years in on this board, if not a 99er.]
But… to throw in,and take from, another movie reference, re the Quasimodem quote:
I am cecil!***
;)
But seriously, **There is no reason to think we will have answers in September, correct?
**
Naah, that might be how any other bunch of people would go at it. We’d have to start out with a debate over whether or not a structure that includes a Chairman and a board of directors is the best structure and, if not, what the alternatives are.
As the kids would say “Gawd, I soooooo envy you!”
Q
Oh, man, that would get taken to Teh Pit RIGHT quick <lol>