Which series of truth-seeking is better-Cecil Adams’ Straight Dope or David Feldman’s Imponderable series?
I would say the Straight Dope utterly beats the Imponderables in this contest.
Most Imponderables are uninteresting and sometimes seem like common knowledge. Straight Dope not so much.
A few of my questions have been published in Imponderables. I also have met Feldman. Neither can be said for the Straight Dope. Yet look where I hang out.
SD all the way. The subjects are more interesting, and the writing has a flair and wit that just can’t be matched.
Not knowing what Feldman’s Imponderables are, I’m gonna dance with the one what brung me.
This is actually a pretty good poll, Curtis. Did you ask it elsewhere? (Of course the SDMB is going to be biased in favor of Cecil’s column, or they likely wouldn’t be here.)
I’ve read, and enjoyed, all of David Feldman’s Imponderables books. In fact, I’m even mentioned by name in one of them. (I suggested an answer to one of his questions.)
However, overall I like the SD better.
Straight Dope. But both sets of books got a good workout in the mid '90s, when I first picked 'em up as a fledgling Angel. So did Big Secrets. I kind of lived in that section of the stacks…
I enjoy them both, but I like the writing style of the Straight Dope books better.
Also, I find the illustrations in the Imponderables books to be distractingly awful. Slug Signorino’s drawings in the SD books are fun.
In the old days “The Straight Dope,” easily beat Imponerables, but since the mid 90s, whoever is writing the column now has turned into a total wuss. Since about 1995 there is no difference between the answers in “The Straight Dope” and “Imponderables.”
“The Straight Dope,” use to have attitude and was shot straight from the hip, now it’s just politically correct crap.
I haven’t asked it anywhere else yet.
What do you mean? Some of the recent Straight Dope still sounds pretty good.
Another SD loyalist.
But no love for Big Secrets or Why Things Are?
Looks like its just you and me dude.
Imponderables seems along the lines of a “Dear Abby”-level version of the Straight Dope at times. However, I don’t get to see it on a regular basis, so perhaps it’s changed?
Of course I’d vote for the Straight Dope. I believe that the Straight Dope gives the best value per word of anything of its type, and I think that it’s a very vital online resource. I read about once a week or so of someone saying “Cecil is lame”, “the Straight Dope sucks”, “only retards think the Straight Dope fights ignorance”, and other winneys, moos, and neighs of complaint. Others say “Wikipedia has everything anyhow”, and “people can get everything they need through Google.”
But can they? While many Wikipedia articles are very well done and complete, how do you know? Since an article may have been compiled from 20 different people and changed almost daily, or even hourly, how do you know that the due diligence to try to tackle a tough question has been done - read through 1,000 pages of discussion on the page? Re-research it yourself? By the time that’s done, you’re to the point where you may as well have sat down and tried to do the research entirely from start to finish.
And then we’re back to Google - you can find a thousand pages on any given subject, and quite often a panoply of viewpoints. Which ones are right - or if that’s impossible to say, then which ones are most likely to be right?
Cecil does a lot of good work to fill 800 words (including humour and the question itself). This does lead to a problem where answers are shortened, or something is not explained fully, or other promising leads are not covered. This need not reduce the value of the Straight Dope, but it does tell folks that 800 words doesn’t tell the whole story.
Often times I see people say that the best days of the Straight Dope are behind it, that the questions now aren’t nearly as cool or whatever as they used to be. I really believe a lot of that is seeing the old Straight Dope through a nostalgic filter. Read through the old columns sometimes - pick a random sampling from, say, 20 years back, and I think the modern column will look a bit better in comparison. I do admit that Cecil faces two problems when evaluating which questions to answer.
One thing is, yes, Wikipedia. If a question is well-answered by Wiki or some other source, then Cecil says he’s not even interested in covering it. Someone once castigated Cecil for “cribbing from Wiki” for the columns, and I had to laugh. Cecil really doesn’t care for Wikipedia - witness the back-and-forth in the “Superman and coal” column, where he picks on me for relying on Wikipedia for some basic facts (it didn’t make it into the column, but he also got after me for using YouTube to find examples of cats trying to climb down trees). So some cool questions/answers are passed over since they’ve been done already.
A second problem is that a lot of the “easy questions” or “low-hanging fruit” is already covered by Cecil or else covered by someone else. This means that Cecil gets asked a lot of questions which, while he could answer them, are very, very obscure and not really seen to be of interest to the broad public. And some are just plain unanswerable, because they refer to something which while interesting is also exceedingly obscure.
Related to that last point is the fact that the topics or fields of the questions sent to Cecil have changed over time. Example: Cecil is sent in a large number - I characterized it as an amazingly large number - of medical-related questions, which explains why medical-related columns have increased over time. Cecil is not sent in many questions of a biographical or historical nature, as once were done - perhaps folks believe that Wikipedia might cover those sorts of items better. At one point I did a rough survey of the (serious) questions sent in over 2 months, and something like 55-60% of them were medical-oriented ones.
I’ve helped Cecil out for some time now, and I still believe that the Straight Dope is a genuine asset to knowledge and education. I wouldn’t spend my time lending a hand to Cecil, Ed, and everyone else, otherwise.
Having read a bit of Imponderables, I propose you add a third option saying SDMB is preferable and we feel disdain for fans of the other.
Which reminds me, how’s this poll doing on the Imponderables Message Board?
Not really. Asking that question here is about like walking down Bourbon Street tonight asking “Who Dat?”. For non-football fans, it would be like picking pretty much any small town church, and conducting an exit poll asking if Jesus was better than Satan.
If that’s true that means about 5% of church-goers think Satan is better than Jesus. :eek:
Or 5% of people like giving smart ass answers to polls.