I tried to search through here for this answer but my mind is still adjusting to the shock of changing from an iPhone 6 Plus to iPhone 6, and I may be missing things. (It’s like going from using a giant screen TV to a 13” B&W)
I noticed that The Straight Dope has been around since 1979 (?). What form did it take before the internet existed?
It was a newspaper column in alternate papers, like the Chicago Reader. Also, books of collected columns.
And it was 1973, not 1979.
The original column may be gone, but it took the entire frickin’ internet to replace it.
The problem with fighting ignorance is ignorance fights back … and wins.
The WWW: spewing nonsense since 1991.
Before the Web got really rolling, it was hosted on AOL for a while. I’d read one of the books (can’t remember which) and I remember this column being the first one I stumbled across on AOL. I particularly remember the sentence, “O.C. was thus asking the world to believe, in essence, that a whole passel of camarasauruses came along, spied Mr. Bronto, noticed how much he looked like themselves, slipped him a mickey, sawed off his noodle, and dragged it along with them until such time as they too departed this vale of tears.”
I knew then The Perfect Master was my kind of teacher.
Informally, there was also a Usenet group, alt.fan.cecil-adams (which I am surprised to be surprised that it’s still active). I do not know when the control message creating that group was sent.
Edit: I know it was well estabished by 1993 when I found it, so there’s that.
Nope, after the edit window closed, 8 found that it was created in 1994.
The first book of collected columns was published in 1984. It’s no longer in print, but used copies aren’t expensive.
I read the thread title as “Straight Dope Pre-WWII” and was imagining fierce debates about the New Deal and whether swing music was a tool of the privileged classes. :smack:
Your reading skills are getting as bad as mine. I tried to parse the title as having something to do with the Wobblies.