In the article on Blowing on Coffee and Vegetable Oil Fat (Why do you blow on coffee to cool it, but on your hands to warm them? Plus: if veggies have no fat, why is veggie oil all fat? - The Straight Dope), Cecil said “They’d probably make avocado oil from the flesh, too, if there were any market for avocado oil, which there isn’t.” This is quite untrue. I use it quite often, and a quick search on Amazon comes up with nearly 100 products. I demand some culinary justice!
And how was the market for avocado oil back in 1994, when that column first appeared?
Ok, so I wasn’t going to post a question on this article, but since it was brought up anyhow…
I understand how the displacement of warm air is the primary cooling factor of blowing on coffee etc, but why was Michael Godfrey wrong? Or rather, I should say “Puckering does seem to cool down my breath verses open-mouth huffing… if that doesn’t explain why, then what does?” Is it actually cooler? If I took Cecil’s hair dryer and put a reducer cap on the end would the air coming out on the hot setting be cooler? (Assuming that the same amount of air escaped, the motor didn’t overheat, etc.)
I didn’t want to start a separate thread on my question, so I hope no one minds that I piggyback on this one. In Cecil’s response to one of the readers’s replies, he refers to “the 'net”. This was 1994, so there was no internet (at least not well-known). So what’’ he referring to?
Usenet, most likely.
The phrase “consulted on the 'net” occurs in Cecil’s response to a follow-up letter (I guess… or email?) from one Michael Godfrey. Neither Godfrey’s missive nor Cecil’s response were dated, so assuming that part dates back to 1994 is unsupportable, and perhaps erroneous.
Also, the Wikipedia article on websites founded before 1995 notes several sites that Cecil could have consulted in 1994. Who knows what wisdom could have been found at Bianca’s Smut Shack, for instance?
P.S. OLIVES and AVOCADOS ARE FRUIT AND NOT VEGETABLES
I just had to get that off my chest after reading that column, because it was driving me batty
alt.fan.cecil-adams was created in early 1994, so that is certainly possible. When did the Straight Dope area on AOL get created? That was the more “Official” home.
Probably an excellent point. But I agree it is on the shelf now. Even Walmart sells it and I use it and grapeseed oil quite a bit. Perhaps since he hardly answers any new questions he could update this column.
It does leave me to wonder why there are so many Straight Dope Classic columns run here. Are there really not enough decent questions for “the master” (term used loosely) to answer or is he just not able to answer very many recently asked questions? I guess when you’re a “master” you can’t be bothered with the questions of the ignorant masses.
The Straight Dope has always been a weekly column.
Your first site says: “Using this more specific definition all fruits areconsidered vegetables, …”
Vegetable is either a completely genereal lay-botanical term meaning all plant parts we eat, or a culinary term meaning all plant parts we’ve decided to call vegetables. Olives and avocados fit both definitions.
Depending on the choice of definition they can also be fruits.
Well, it wasn’t as well known, but I started using the Internet in 1991. It helped that I was working for a university, since in Australia at that time it was limited to universities and a few government research organisations. In addition, this was before HTML and the Web, so you accessed it via email and FTP, indexed by such tools as Gopher.
The Straight Dope is, at its heart, a weekly newspaper column. There is one new column a week, because that is the original form.
The website was created as a supplement. The board is a supplement to the supplement.
We get one column a week, because that is what Cecil is paid to write and what is published. We get classic columns the other weekdays because it gives something “new” posted to the website daily, thus giving a reason to keep checking the website.
Well I stand corrected. I just looked it up and any oil derived from plants is categorized as veggie oil, but it still bugs me 
Regarding puckering vs. open mouth huffing - I thinks its wind chill effect. Unless you consciously slow your inhalation, you are drawing the same volumes of air in through the small pucker hole as the open mouth over the same period of time. Therefore, the air must be moving faster - higher wind chill.
Yes. Too many people think only of the World Wide Web when they say Internet, but the WWW is only a part of the Net.
“They made formative contributions to the history of the world wide web.”
I am an idiot. I didn’t even look at the publish date. Thanks.
April R, does it trouble you when someone says that a carrot is a vegetable? Because it’s really a root. Or how about spinach? Because that’s really a leaf. If those don’t bother you, why not?
Not to mention that “vegetable” also means any macroscopic life form that is not an animal.